Meanwhile, our government continues to spend about $5 million on the Flannery Centre, named after the bloke who predicted our dams would never be full again, the same bloke PM Gillard is paying $180,000 for three days “work” a week to peddle what the evidence has clearly proved to be nonsense.

And in a line that’s reminiscent of Clint Eastwood’s famous, “Get off my lawn!”, he told a turbine peddler who was hoping to set up shop on his land quite clearly to “stay away from my estate, young man.”

Why the peddler was surprised is anyone’s guess since the prince had good reason to pan the inefficient, massively expensive gimmicks.

Their arguments range from, “it’s got to be better to put wind turbines up”, to “other countries around the world are doing it”. One cites the example of Germany, which has led the world in subsidising solar panels.

Yes, Germany has spent more than $75 billion on inefficient solar technology delivering a mere 0.1 per cent of its total energy supply. And this will postpone global warming by how much? A whole seven hours by the end of the century.

The ads give the impression that solar and wind are ready to take over from fossil fuels. Yet, even in a very optimistic scenario, the International Energy Agency estimates that by 2035, solar and energy will contribute only about 1.6 per cent of global energy.

Read on.

Fancy that. The very people who will benefit the most from Julia’s carbon (dioxide!) tax via subsidies (read: your tax dollars taken from you and given to someone else) are the very people spruiking it.

No, not laughing at you because they’ve swindled billions from the gullible and not-so-gullible tax payer, but literally the concrete foundations they rest on.

So far, it’s not 100% confirmed but have a read:

I am at an energy conference in Europe.

Yesterday I talked to two friends of mine who are involved in civil engineering in the UK. They both told me that concrete foundations for onshore wind turbine towers in the UK are starting to crack. Apparently it is being hushed up as much as possible. (There is only a small possibility that this is an unfounded rumour. But, as always, the possibility exists.)

The lawyers are deep into it with accusations of negligence and the like flying in all directions. Apparently the defence has been that they were built according to the current code. But there seems to be no doubt that the code is inadequate. But does the engineer have an obligation to design something that will meet the requirements of that particular site or blindly follow a code? And then there is the fact that they are part of a fixed price turnkey package so everybody has always tried to cut foundations and everything else to the absolute minimum.

Anyway, if this problem is widespread it will be the biggest blow to windpower in the UK so far.